Puddles

Bluebelle stayed in my office with me all day today, sleeping in the doggie bed at my feet, next to the heating vent, while Jinx snored beneath his blanket on the living room couch. The raw, damp weather made perfect sleeping for them, helped along by the fact that Dixee wasn’t here with us to whine and to yap. My wife took her to the vet’s office to be checked out after her recent tussle with the spotted twins, and to be groomed while there. One can work quite peacefully under the soft sighs of sleeping dogs with cold rain pattering just outside the door and Hovhaness playing at a low volume in the background.

My lower back has been aching over the weekend and is still painful today. I’m pretty certain that I wrenched it during the dog donnybrook from a few days back. I remember bending forward at the waist to retrieve Dixee from the jaws o’ death and straightening up abruptly. I’m sure that did it. I try to keep my intake of things like acetaminophen and ibuprofen to a minimum, but I do use a topical pain relief agent pretty liberally. The stuff is applied with a roll-on, like deodorant, and contains mostly menthol and glucosamine. It gives immediate but short-lived relief.

Whining about my aches & pains usually shames me when I catch myself doing it, and it reminds me of how stoic my mother was about physical pain. In my entire childhood, I remember her calling in sick three times. Once was with the flu during a dreary Christmas season, once with an abscessed molar, and….I can’t remember what was going on the third time. It wasn’t a measly aching back, I do know that much for certain.

I also think back to a man I met in a hospital 17 or 17 years ago. In his mid-forties, he worked on a highway crew. He was in the hospital after a heart attack, and during my brief interaction with him, he mentioned that he was in great pain from an injury sustained some months ago. He explained that a blasting cap had detonated while he was holding it and it had torn his hand up. He raised the hand to show me, revealing a red, swollen mass with small holes and abrasions all over it. He pressed a thumb against the back of the hand and pus oozed from several of the small holes. “I can’t hardly rest at night from the throbbing,” he said. “I have to sit on the side of the bed til it eases up a bit.”

I asked him if he had received medical treatment for this injury, and he shook his head. “Don’t have insurance. I don’t know how I’m gonna pay for this heart attack bill.”

I then asked what the physicians had said about it during this hospital stay. He told me that he hadn’t mentioned it, and that apparently no one had noticed it. I reached over and pushed the call button for a nurse. When a nurse entered, I introduced myself and described my conversation with the patient.

Within seconds I was breathing a prayer of thanks, because I could see this nurse was no chipper chirpy bossy type, but rather a true nurse, concerned about the health and welfare of another human being. She examined the man and asked several questions, then left the room. Within minutes, she reentered the room with a young doctor in tow. She was in the middle of explaining the situation to the doctor. The doctor examined the man, asked his own set of questions, and began writing up referral orders to have the man seen by some specialists that very day. I left the room, grateful for the nurse and for the doctor, grateful that I hadn’t encountered One Of Those, and grateful for the man having confided in me about his pain. With that level of toughness and grit, who could say how long he would have waited before mentioning it or seeking treatment?

And today, doing a completely different job to earn a paycheck, I think back to that hard, resolute man with his friendly eyes and apologetic manner, and I think of numberless hordes streaming across the southern border of this former nation, and of all the free benefits and care they’ll receive, and of how I (and the man with the shattered hand, if he’s still alive) will be paying for their care.

**

I went to the mailbox mid-day to check the mail, clad in boots and rain jacket. When I stepped out into the front yard, I had to avoid the puddles in the low places, but I found myself staring at these small pools and their mutable pattern of raindrops on their surfaces. On impulse, I squatted and placed my palms onto the surface of one of the puddles, touching the water as lightly as I could, feeling the cold seep up my hands to my wrists and forearms. Just a few seconds of this chilled my entire body, and so I stood up and brushed my hands on my jacket and continued, on up the driveway to the road and then to the black and glistening mailbox.

On the way back, mail tucked into an inner pocket to protect it, I watched the puddles settled in the dips and low places of the packed gravel driveway, puddles where the birds like to drink and bathe, and I smiled to think of how, small and young and wrapped in a bright yellow raincoat with heavy metal snaps, I would kick and stomp and slash my way through every puddle in my path on my walk to and from school. And nowadays I pick my way with care, mindful that if I lifted my leg to stomp a puddle I might well slip and fall and break a hip. What the doctors call “a sentinel event.”

But what I can do, and what I did do today, is stand for a moment under the chilled pelting and touch the trunk of a tulip poplar, feeling the cold lichens and the rain-slicked bark, wondering if the tree can feel the warmth, the life-vibration of my hand, wondering if its awareness of me is via the trunk before my face, or instead if the slender and dripping branches above me look down at me, sensing my curiosity and my good will. Ah, here he is again.

I am a child of the poor South, molded and compacted from the dirt across which my mother and her kin once moved on bare, bruised feet to and fro in the rows of cotton stalks, in the kingdom of the weevil, under the life-giving and life-taking sun. Like them, I am accustomed to weather, to the slow roll of clouds, to the call of the red-winged blackbird, to the scent of pond water, to the sting of mosquito and the maddening rash of poison ivy. It is wintertime today, but those things will come again, and the air will have warmed, and who can say if the rising temperatures may enliven me, even embolden me to the point where I will swing a leg at a puddle and kick a sheet of rainwater across the watching grass?

~ S.K. Orr